VA - 2017 - Hibernation Reverses The Outcome Of Genetic Competiton 3xCS

Originally posted May 14, 2017 1:00AM

Thousands Of Dead Gods - GODS07

Three cassettes, three artists, two pieces each. Rather than behaving like a conventional compilation where everybody contributes a track to the same running order, this feels more like three small experiments placed beside one another. The elaborate physical presentation reinforces that. The release keeps unfolding through separate cassette shells, inserts, photographs, diagrams and blocks of reproduced text, so there is no single cover image capable of summarizing the whole thing. Even the name reads like the result line from a scientific paper instead of an album title. It makes the set feel catalogued, observed and filed away before the tapes ever reach a deck.
Shredded Nerve opens with “Broken Line,” just under five minutes, and it actually earns the title structurally. The piece begins at a distance, with relatively little occupying the recording, then keeps acquiring new fragments. Repeating mechanical shapes, smeared electronic sounds and rough tape-loop motion gradually make the first minute feel less empty. Nothing locks into a comfortable cycle. A repetition establishes itself just long enough to be recognized, then some new scrape, thud or wavering tone changes its outline. The second half becomes increasingly crowded and physical, with several particularly strong surges near the end. What started as scattered pieces eventually sounds almost overfilled. “Head With No Skull” does not repeat that build. It arrives much more fully formed and spends its five minutes behaving like unstable machinery: sharper interruptions, quicker changes, and a nervous stop-start quality inside the continuing mechanical activity. The two pieces work well as a pair because the first assembles itself while the second seems already assembled and malfunctioning.
Pleasure Island changes the pacing immediately. “Sexualized Nature,” at about six and a half minutes, is more patient and strangely suspended. A deep sustained presence carries much of the piece while other sounds slowly gather around it. The attraction is less in abrupt edits than in the feeling of something being continuously altered while held in place. Early passages are comparatively restrained, but the piece keeps expanding until the later minutes become far more forceful. Around five minutes it reaches its largest form, then begins an extended retreat. The ending does not snap off; it drains away. “Easter Snow” begins even closer to nothing. For the opening seconds the listener has to lean toward it, after which a thin electronic shape starts acquiring body. The piece moves through several states without ever losing that sense of gradual emergence. Then, very late, around the four-minute mark, it suddenly becomes much larger. The final minute contains the strongest activity on the Pleasure Island tape before everything collapses back toward silence. Both pieces have the unusual sensation of weather arriving: first detectable as a change in the air, then impossible to ignore, then gone.
Scant closes the set with two parts carrying the same name, and they behave almost like inverse drawings of one another. “Incipient Belief I” begins already substantial. Its central sound is continuous and enveloping, but there are small disturbances passing through it, little rough edges and changes in shape that keep it from settling into pure drone. The piece becomes strongest late, roughly three and a half minutes in, and then begins losing itself. The final forty seconds are essentially a long withdrawal. “Incipient Belief II” starts from the opposite end. For its first moments there is barely anything there. Instead of arriving as a completed environment, it slowly materializes. The sound gains strength almost imperceptibly, reaches its broadest point around the middle-to-late section, and then begins receding again. Heard consecutively, the two tracks create a satisfying reversal: one starts as certainty and dissolves; the other seems to discover its own existence.
That distinction between the three artists is what makes the set work. Shredded Nerve treats sound as material to cut, repeat and destabilize. Pleasure Island allows events to accumulate on a much slower clock, where the important moment may be something taking several minutes to arrive. Scant makes the act of appearing and disappearing feel like the composition itself. None of them needs to provide a conventional song, and none of the three approaches collapses into the others. Moving from cassette to cassette changes the listener’s sense of time.
The strange title becomes more interesting in that context. The scientific phrase describes an outcome changing because conditions have changed and time has passed. Something stored behaves differently later than it did at the beginning. Without forcing the music into an illustration of that idea, the set repeatedly plays with the same basic phenomenon: repetition does not guarantee sameness. A sound returns altered. A quiet beginning eventually overwhelms the recording. Something apparently stable erodes. One piece accumulates what another piece removes. The cassette format makes that especially tangible because everything here is literally stored material being retrieved again.
There is a lot packed into roughly half an hour, but the three-cassette format prevents it from feeling compressed. Each pair gets its own little chamber. You finish one, physically remove it, choose the next and begin again. That interruption matters. The set asks you to repeatedly reset your ears.
—ChatGPT

JS Aurelius - 2017 - -165dbm_hz Electromagnetic Eavesdropped 1d-Signal CS

Originally posted Sep 9, 2017 3:41PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS08

The title looks less like the name of a record than something copied directly from a laboratory display. That is a useful way into this cassette. Across roughly sixty-seven minutes, J.S. Aurelius makes listening feel suspiciously close to monitoring: waiting for activity, noticing an interruption, wondering whether a sound is carrying information or whether the sound itself is the information. The electronics repeatedly resemble transmissions caught halfway between usefulness and disappearance. Thin whistles hang in space. Low oscillations arrive and persist. Short bursts chatter, flicker or pulse. Hiss becomes active enough to listen into rather than simply listen through. There are stretches where several signals seem to coexist without acknowledging one another, as though the receiver has wandered into a crowded invisible neighborhood.
Side A is nearly thirty-four minutes, and its scale matters. The opening is comparatively assertive, with a strong repeating electronic presence that immediately establishes the sensation of receiving something rather than being presented with a conventional composition. But Aurelius does not spend the side continually adding material. About four or five minutes in, the signal loses a great deal of its initial force. That retreat changes the act of listening. Quieter events suddenly become consequential because there is no longer a large sound telling you where to look. A faint pulse, narrow tone or bit of electronic grit can occupy the foreground simply by being the only thing currently insisting on itself. Then the tape wakes up again. Other sections become busier, with rapidly oscillating sounds and harsher electronic interference accumulating until it feels as though several incompatible machines have found the same frequency.
The middle of Side A is especially restless. It keeps exchanging one type of activity for another rather than building toward a single climax. Around thirteen or fourteen minutes the sound becomes noticeably sharper and more agitated; later, the whole thing retreats again. By the twenties, long passages are quiet enough that listening starts to resemble searching. This is where the cassette becomes most interesting to me. Silence is never exactly empty. There is always the possibility that something tiny is happening inside it. The ear begins behaving differently, almost involuntarily increasing its own sensitivity. Then, late in the side, a much deeper repeating signal takes over. After so much thin, scattered electronic information, those slow low oscillations feel enormous. The final couple of minutes recede toward the noise floor until the distinction between composition, captured signal and the simple presence of the recording medium becomes wonderfully unclear.
Side B begins from almost the opposite position. It is subdued enough at first that the smallest repeating sounds become the subject. Little pulses appear to blink in and out. There are tones that feel functional rather than expressive, the kinds of noises a device might make without any concern that a human being is listening. That becomes strangely compelling over time. Most electronic music asks machines to communicate something on our behalf. Here it often feels as though the machines were already communicating and somebody simply opened the door.
The side gradually becomes more populated. Around ten minutes there is a substantial increase in activity, and by the middle of the side the recording has become much more forceful. Signals overlap, rapid fluctuations appear, and stretches that began with almost nothing become crowded with electronic motion. Then Aurelius lets sections fall away again. The dramatic gesture is frequently subtraction: a busy field disappears and leaves one stubborn pulse behind. Later another source arrives and changes the entire apparent scale of what you are hearing. Some sounds seem microscopic, others strangely architectural.
The last third of Side B becomes increasingly animated. Repeating electronic figures begin behaving almost rhythmically without settling into anything resembling percussion. At moments the tape seems to be cycling through several states of the same machine: idle, transmitting, searching, overloaded, quiet, transmitting again. By the final few minutes the activity has become surprisingly insistent compared with the near-emptiness encountered elsewhere on the cassette. Nothing suddenly reveals what all these signals “mean.” That would almost ruin it. The fascination comes from being allowed to hear information before interpretation.
The artwork fits that idea particularly well because it does not make the cassette look theatrical. It resembles technical evidence, a piece of documentation accompanying an experiment whose purpose has only been partially explained. That also separates this release from several of the other Dead Gods tapes surrounding it. There is no gore or medical metaphor required to produce unease. The discomfort here comes from something ordinarily invisible becoming audible.
Radio, GPS, wireless networks, switching electronics and computers have filled ordinary space with transmissions that human ears cannot perceive directly. We live inside that activity without experiencing most of it as sensory information. This cassette makes that fact feel uncanny. Not because it invents a futuristic environment, but because it suggests that the futuristic environment was already sitting in the room.
The strangest instrument here may ultimately be attention itself.
Turn something up loudly enough and everybody hears it. Reduce it toward −165 dBm/Hz and listening becomes an act of hunting.
—ChatGPT

Blood Burning - 2018 - Stung In Coma CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 10:33PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS20

“Stung In Coma” is a good title for music that seems simultaneously agitated and immobilized. Blood Burning spends long stretches holding the listener inside one continuous condition, but things keep happening underneath that apparent stasis. Sounds worry at one another. A rough pulse starts to suggest itself and gets obscured. Something sharper enters from one side of the recording and hangs there until the rest of the sound catches up with it. There is always activity, but very little of it behaves like an announcement.

Side A lasts nearly sixteen minutes. It begins already occupied, without much ceremony: a coarse electronic churn with several things apparently happening at once. There are low, blunt sounds underneath thinner scraping and fizzing material, and the whole recording has an unstable, slightly seasick motion. During the opening minutes, particular noises occasionally poke far enough out of the mass to seem briefly identifiable, then disappear before they resolve into anything familiar. That uncertainty is one of the better qualities of the tape. It continually sounds as though some source is about to reveal itself.

The side does not progress in a straight line toward greater intensity. It swells, slumps, catches another current and moves again. Around two minutes the upper portion of the sound becomes especially ragged and active, then the tape settles back into a heavier crawl. Five or six minutes in, the action seems increasingly packed toward the middle of the sound, less sprayed across the entire range. The result is almost claustrophobic. Instead of a giant blast filling the room, there is a narrower mass that keeps rubbing against itself.

By the last third, repetition has done something interesting to perception. Sounds that would have registered as ugly interruptions earlier now feel like characters returning. A scraping figure passes through. A blunt surge underneath it answers. Something briefly flutters or sputters. None of these events lasts long enough to become a motif in the normal musical sense, but after ten minutes the ear has learned the neighborhood.

Around thirteen minutes the recording suddenly becomes more forceful. It is one of the few places where the level itself becomes an obvious event rather than merely another detail inside the piece. The sound swells and bunches together, then gradually loosens again. By the final minute the activity feels worn down rather than triumphantly concluded. The side simply runs out of road.

Side B is much longer, a little over twenty and a half minutes on the file, with the actual program ending before the final stretch of blank tape. It starts more cautiously than Side A. Individual noises seem to have slightly more room around them, and during the first several minutes the piece keeps rearranging itself instead of establishing one dominant state. There are passages that feel almost hollow followed by sudden clusters of abrasion. At other points something resembling a repeating mechanical motion appears underneath the electronic debris, only to be knocked sideways again.

The strangest part arrives well into the side. Around eleven minutes the entire recording seems to sink. Higher material recedes and an enormous low sound begins taking over. For the next few minutes it feels as though the floor has dropped out beneath everything else. The change is dramatic precisely because Blood Burning has spent so long avoiding big theatrical gestures. After more than twenty-five minutes of gradual mutation across the cassette, suddenly there is this dark, lumbering region that barely resembles what preceded it.

Then, around fourteen minutes, it flips.

The bottom falls away and a much brighter, harsher band of sound jumps forward. The effect is almost physical after several minutes submerged in the low section. The remaining stretch keeps working this brittle material, sometimes narrowing into an especially cutting hiss or scrape, sometimes allowing heavier sound to creep underneath again. It is probably the clearest structural turn anywhere on the cassette, and it makes the final five minutes feel almost like waking into a different room.

Eventually the piece thins out and disappears. There is then a substantial stretch of nearly blank cassette at the end of the rip, which I like leaving intact. After more than half an hour of constant irritation, grinding, buzzing and slow mutation, hearing the mechanism continue with almost nothing feeding it becomes part of the experience. Suddenly the cassette itself is what remains.

Blood Burning does not make this interesting by constantly throwing new sounds into the pile. The tape works because it stays with things longer than expected. It lets irritation become familiarity, familiarity become expectation, and then uses a comparatively simple change to upset what the ear has learned. Thirty-five minutes is plenty of time for a noise to stop sounding like an intrusion and start sounding like the place you are living in.

Then somebody moves the furniture.
—ChatGPT

Blind Date - 2018 - Levitation Game CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 11:20PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS17

The physical cassette is immediately severe: degraded black-and-white imagery, pale photocopied paper, hard blocks of black ink and the clear shell underneath. Nothing on the package tries to soften the material. The reproduction quality itself becomes part of the image, details sinking into toner and shadow until the cover feels less photographic than damaged. Dead Gods released it as GODS17, and the approximately fifteen minutes inside have the same quality of recognizable information being pushed until it begins dissolving.
Side A runs about 7:25 and starts comparatively low and heavy before opening into a much brighter field of harsh noise. The first minute has substantial bass and lower-midrange pressure underneath the surface, but the upper frequencies gradually become more aggressive. By the middle of the side there is a wide abrasive spread of static, distortion and sustained feedback-like material, with different frequency bands continually pushing through one another. It is dense without being stationary. A layer will become unusually sharp, another will swell underneath it, and then the whole balance shifts again. Around the four-minute point the low end becomes especially pronounced, temporarily giving the noise a much heavier center before the texture starts breaking into smaller changes. The final couple of minutes move through several noticeably different densities rather than simply maintaining maximum volume. There are thinner sections, rougher granular passages and renewed bursts of brighter noise before the recording abruptly drops away at the end. The cassette surface is audible around the quieter edges, but there are no obvious random pops or defects dominating the transfer. Most of the dirt belongs to the source.
Side B is slightly longer at about 7:37 and immediately changes the weight of the recording. There is more concentrated low-frequency material here and, overall, less of the sustained upper-frequency glare that defines much of Side A. The opening has a deep, compacted body with rougher material moving above it, then the spectrum repeatedly widens and contracts. Certain sections become surprisingly bright, particularly during the first couple of minutes, but the side keeps returning to darker rumble and midrange abrasion. From roughly the middle onward the music settles into an especially heavy stretch where small changes in density become the main events. A narrow frequency rises, a rough texture begins scraping across the surface, or the bass loses some of its mass and suddenly exposes what had been buried underneath. During the final two minutes the higher frequencies begin asserting themselves again, gradually making the recording feel more open and agitated before the cassette finally empties into silence.
What keeps both sides interesting is the amount of motion inside sounds that could initially be mistaken for walls. Blind Date does not rely on a giant collection of obvious events. Instead, pressure is constantly redistributed. Bass gives way to static. A bright abrasive band suddenly exposes a darker layer underneath. Saturation thickens and then loosens. The structure becomes clearer through sustained listening because the ear starts recognizing those changes in proportion. There is an almost tactile quality to it: some passages feel compacted and hard, others loose and grainy, others thin enough that individual frequencies seem to hang separately in the air.
The original January 2018 Private Release post preserved little more than the cassette identification and download. Hearing complete fresh transfers of both sides makes the release much more specific. Side A has a noticeably brighter, more outward-facing aggression, while Side B pulls much of the same harsh-noise vocabulary downward into heavier frequencies. Together they make a short, carefully shaped cassette where movement happens inside saturation. The wall is never actually standing still.
—ChatGPT

Scant - 2017 - Shivers CS

Originally posted Sep 8, 2017 10:14PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS12

The physical presentation is spare and degraded in exactly the way this material benefits from. Photocopied imagery, heavy black areas, pale paper and the clear cassette shell make the object feel more like a fragment of private documentation than a conventional album package. There is very little visual information fighting for attention. Everything has been reduced to image, texture, name and object, which leaves the sound to provide most of the detail.

Side A is almost exactly five minutes and begins after only a brief stretch of leader. The sound arrives as a thick, sustained mass dominated by low and lower-mid frequencies, with distortion and rougher material continually moving across its surface. It is loud and physically dense, but not especially bright for harsh noise. Much of its force comes from weight rather than treble. Underneath the obvious saturation there are sustained tones and slowly changing resonances, sometimes producing beating patterns as closely spaced frequencies rub against one another. What initially sounds fairly fixed begins to move once the ear adjusts. Certain frequencies swell forward, others recede, and the texture repeatedly shifts between something almost smooth and something much more granular and damaged.

There is very little silence or conventional punctuation. Instead, the five minutes behave like one object being examined under changing pressure. The cassette surface contributes a faint instability around the edges, but the recording itself supplies most of the abrasion. This does not sound like accidental tape deterioration masquerading as music. The distortion, low-frequency pressure and sustained electronic material are clearly doing deliberate work. There are moments where the mass thins enough for individual tones to become more apparent, then the layers close around them again. Because the piece is so short, none of those states are allowed to settle for very long.

Side B is slightly shorter, about 4:56, and noticeably quieter overall. Its frequency balance is also different. There is less of the thick continuous low-end body that dominates Side A and somewhat more activity higher in the spectrum. That makes the second side feel more exposed and brittle even though it is not as loud. The individual layers are easier to separate: sustained tones, rough static-like surfaces, narrow bands of feedback and smaller electronic fluctuations appear against one another instead of being compressed into a single heavy block.

That contrast gives the cassette a surprisingly clear two-part shape. Side A feels compacted and bodily, with the sound pushing outward from a heavy center. Side B opens the structure and lets more air appear between frequencies. Neither side develops through recognizable melody or rhythm. Movement comes from accumulation, subtraction, interference and changes in density. The title “Shivers” is particularly effective against that second side, where slight fluctuations and trembling upper frequencies become more perceptible once the heavier mass has been reduced.

At roughly ten minutes total, there is no excess here. Scant establishes a limited group of sounds, pushes them into two different configurations and stops. Hearing the complete cassette again makes the distinction between the sides much more important than the original 2017 Private Release post could show. What had been little more than a catalog entry now reveals a compact piece built around weight, resonance, distortion and the difference between a sound being completely filled in and one beginning to fracture apart.
—ChatGPT

Breaking The Will - 2018 - Affinities CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 10:52PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS15

The physical presentation is immediately recognizable as part of the Dead Gods run: inexpensive materials, blue-green photocopy reproduction, dense black areas and imagery that has been pushed far enough through reproduction that information begins turning into texture. Nothing is trying to look luxurious. The imperfections are the design. The clear cassette shell keeps the mechanism visible while the black-and-white labeling, crooked edges and degraded printed surfaces make the whole thing feel handled, duplicated and materially present. “Affinities” is an interesting title for something this abrasive because the music really does seem to be about relationships between sounds: low pressure against static, one frequency dragging against another, dense masses separating and recombining.
Side A runs about 9:52 and arrives almost immediately at a high level of intensity. There is very little introductory space. A thick band of harsh noise occupies most of the frequency range, with heavy low and midrange material underneath a much brighter abrasive surface. The upper frequencies give the first side a particularly exposed quality. Static tears across the top while rougher, heavier material churns underneath it. Despite the apparent wall of sound, it is not motionless. The texture keeps changing internally. Certain frequencies suddenly become more prominent, narrow bands of feedback rise through the mass, the low end thickens, and sections of granular noise appear to grind against one another before being absorbed back into the larger field.
The important movement happens inside sustained density rather than through dramatic stops and starts. For long stretches the overall volume barely changes, forcing the ear to pay attention to smaller alterations in texture. Once that happens, the piece becomes surprisingly detailed. There are passages with a coarse, almost crumbling quality followed by stretches where the sound becomes smoother and more pressurized. Other moments expose sharper high-frequency edges that resemble electrical hiss or overloaded circuitry without settling into a clean identifiable source. As the side progresses, the lower portion becomes increasingly substantial. By the final minutes there is considerably more weight underneath the abrasion than there was at the beginning. The ending does not resolve anything. The mass simply reaches the edge of the cassette and disappears, leaving the sudden quiet of the tape mechanism as the most dramatic break in the entire piece.
Side B is almost exactly ten minutes and immediately feels darker. The average level is slightly lower than Side A, but the more noticeable difference is tonal: far less energy is concentrated in the very high frequencies, while low and lower-midrange sound carries much more of the physical weight. The result is thicker and more enclosed. The noise feels less like something spraying outward and more like something grinding internally. Early in the side there is a pronounced alteration in the texture, after which a deep continuous foundation dominates much of what follows. Higher sounds still scrape across it, but they occupy a narrower space and therefore seem more isolated whenever they emerge.
That difference makes Side B especially effective after Side A. It is not simply another ten minutes at the same settings. The first side is brighter, more open at the top and more visibly abrasive; the second is murkier and more subterranean. Small changes in the bass become important, as do the places where a thin frequency suddenly pushes through the heavier material. There are occasional moments where the layers almost separate enough to expose the recording underneath, and that is where the cassette medium becomes audible as part of the piece. There is a constant granular surface to the rip, but I do not hear distracting random pops or obvious damage that would suggest a bad transfer. The roughness belongs overwhelmingly to the source recording itself. The tape has a dirty, saturated character without sounding physically ruined.
Taken together, the two sides make “Affinities” feel less like twenty minutes of undifferentiated harsh noise than two closely related examinations of density. The materials remain deliberately restricted, but their proportions change. Bright static can make a low rumble suddenly seem enormous; sustained bass can make one narrow high-frequency scrape feel almost surgical. Repetition makes tiny differences audible. What initially registers as a solid block starts revealing grain, pressure, layers, shifting frequency relationships and brief openings inside the mass.
The original Private Release post left virtually all of that undocumented. It identified the cassette and supplied the download, which was enough to preserve its existence but not much of its character. Listening again to complete fresh rips of both sides makes the tape feel much more specific. This is not simply “harsh noise” as a generic category. Side A and Side B occupy distinctly different spaces, and the attraction is in listening long enough for an apparently impenetrable surface to start breaking into individual components. The longer it plays, the more the wall stops being a wall.
—ChatGPT

Cominform - 2018 - Brigade 2506 CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 9:58PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS16

The object establishes its atmosphere immediately. Pale blue paper, thick black photocopy borders, a degraded photographic image almost blocked out by heavy rectangular bands, COMINFORM running vertically down the spine, and “BRIGADE 2506” printed underneath the photograph. The back reduces everything to two dates: Side A, “4.15.61,” and Side B, “4.20.61.” The transparent cassette is almost completely covered by a black-and-white wraparound label made from enlarged, overlapping circular symbols, cropped so aggressively that they stop reading as clean signs and become an abstract pattern. The whole package feels informational rather than decorative, somewhere between a photocopied intelligence file, propaganda leaflet and damaged archival evidence.
Those dates are important because neither side is presented with a conventional song title. They act more like coordinates. Before hearing anything, the cassette has already placed the listener inside a historical and political atmosphere, but the audio does not turn that material into a literal documentary. There is no tidy narrative explaining what happened. Instead Cominform works through repetition, abrasion and mechanical recurrence, letting the references on the package sit against a sound that behaves more like machinery or communications equipment than storytelling.
Side A runs just under ten minutes and begins with a relatively thin, exposed field before accumulating much greater low and midrange weight. Repetition is fundamental, but these are not clean electronic loops clicking around identical circles. Each return seems slightly altered by saturation, overlapping frequencies and the physical instability of the recording. A figure comes around again and again until the ear begins predicting it, then another layer changes the proportion of the sound. The first minute is comparatively bright and scratchy; after that the recording settles into a darker, heavier band of frequencies. Around the middle of the side the mass becomes noticeably more forceful, with repeated industrial pulses and rough electronic material stacking together until the loop starts feeling less like a pattern and more like pressure.
That is one of the most effective things about the tape. Repetition does not create comfort. It creates surveillance. You become aware of tiny differences precisely because the same basic material keeps returning. A sound that initially seems static begins revealing fluctuations in speed, distortion, frequency and volume. There are moments where the source feels almost identifiable as some mechanical action, followed by moments where copying, amplification and repetition have stripped away whatever the original source might have been. By the later portion of Side A the sound has become broader and more saturated, then gradually loses mass approaching the end. The machinery does not climax so much as begin disappearing.
Side B, also just under ten minutes, reorganizes the same vocabulary. It starts more quietly but quickly introduces a brighter and more abrasive upper-frequency presence than much of the middle of Side A. The loops feel exposed, with sharper edges and more obvious gaps between different layers. During the first several minutes those upper frequencies accumulate until the recording has a dry, scraping surface over the repeated underlying motion. Around the middle, however, the balance shifts again. Lower frequencies thicken dramatically and the piece becomes heavier and more enclosed, as though the same process is now being heard from inside the machine rather than beside it.
The second half of Side B keeps changing that relationship between weight and abrasion. Low mechanical material anchors the recording while thinner electrical frequencies cut through it, sometimes dominating for a few seconds before being swallowed again. Because the structures repeat, every new frequency feels disproportionately important. There is no beat in a conventional sense, yet there is absolutely rhythm: rotations, pulses, recurring impacts and the timing created by objects returning through a loop. Eventually the side begins emptying out. The last portion becomes much quieter until what remains is closer to residual tape surface and fragments of signal than the dense industrial body heard earlier.
The physical cassette suits that construction extremely well. The transparent shell lets the mechanism remain visible, but the oversized paper label obscures much of it. The cover photograph likewise contains information while simultaneously blocking information with those heavy black forms. Even the music operates that way. Something recognizable enters the loop and repetition should theoretically make it easier to examine, yet repeated copying and distortion gradually erase its identity. Information becomes texture.
There is also something striking about how restrained the release is. Two sides, two dates, roughly twenty minutes, almost no explanatory text. Cominform does not need to continually introduce new material because the interest comes from watching limited material mutate under repetition. The cassette rewards listening past the first impression of “industrial loop.” Once the ear settles in, every change in pressure, frequency, spacing and degradation becomes an event. The original Private Release post barely documented any of that. Hearing the complete sides again makes this feel much less like an anonymous old noise cassette and much more like a carefully constructed little machine.
—ChatGPT

Whorl Of Sepals - 2017 - ST CS

Originally posted Sept 8, 2017 10:32PM

 Dead Gods ‎– GODS11

The packaging has the same deliberately murky quality as the recording. Dark photographic imagery is reproduced through a muted green/blue cast, with black areas swallowing detail and the whole thing looking closer to an artifact pulled from a drawer than a clean piece of contemporary graphic design. The cassette and folded artwork do not give much away. There is no elaborate explanation waiting inside to tell you how to hear it, just Whorl Of Sepals, the physical object and Dead Gods catalog number GODS11. That sparseness works especially well here because the approximately fifteen minutes of audio are unusually concentrated. The two sides use related materials but occupy very different physical spaces.
Side A runs about 7:31. It begins comparatively quietly, with a sustained low tone and thin upper-frequency activity gradually gathering around it. Within the first minute the recording grows considerably louder and denser. What follows is less a sequence of obvious events than a continuously shifting body of sound: low fundamental tones, distortion, feedback-like overtones and rough harmonic layers pressing against one another. There is a surprising amount of internal movement despite how static the basic construction can initially seem. Frequencies flare up, smear together and retreat. At times a tone becomes recognizable enough to feel almost musical before saturation roughens its edges again. The strongest low material sits underneath a much brighter field of upper harmonics, so the sound has both weight and a strangely glowing top end. It never becomes anonymous broadband noise. There are pitches buried inside it, along with beating frequencies and small changes in pressure that become more noticeable the longer the side continues.
The recording quality is part of the piece. Side A is substantially louder than Side B and often feels close to the limits of the cassette, but the overload is useful rather than merely destructive. The distortion generates additional texture around the sustained tones, and the slightly unstable surface keeps them from turning into sterile electronic drones. There is audible grain around everything. Around the six-and-a-half-minute point the large central mass suddenly loses most of its weight. Instead of ending at its maximum intensity, the side collapses into a much quieter final stretch where residual tones and tape-level noise are exposed. After spending several minutes inside such a dense field, that reduction feels enormous. The ear has adjusted to pressure, so the absence of it becomes its own event.
Side B, about 7:42, immediately changes the scale. It is noticeably quieter and darker, with far more of its energy concentrated at the extreme bottom of the spectrum. Deep sustained frequencies sit underneath the recording for most of the side, sometimes low enough that the sound is felt almost as much as heard through speakers capable of reproducing it. The upper-frequency material is much more restrained than on Side A. Instead of the brighter, abrasive cloud hovering over the first side, this one works through slow alterations in bass weight, resonance and harmonics. Small changes matter. A low tone thickens. Another frequency enters and produces beating against it. A higher overtone becomes visible for a while and then sinks back underneath the fundamental. Because the overall volume is lower, the cassette hiss and roughness around the signal are easier to hear, giving the sound a more exposed physical edge.
What I like about hearing the two complete sides together is how little Whorl Of Sepals needs in order to create contrast. Side A expands upward and outward until it becomes a dense, bright, distorted field, then drains away. Side B seems to turn the entire cassette downward, concentrating on sustained bass and slower internal motion. There are no conventional rhythms, melodies or obvious song structures organizing the experience. The structure comes from density, frequency, volume and duration. Even the unequal levels between the sides become useful information rather than something I would want corrected out of the rip. They preserve the sensation of turning the cassette over and encountering a different physical environment.
This was originally posted to Private Release in September 2017 with almost no written description. Hearing the cassette again from a fresh side-by-side rip makes that old post feel unusually incomplete. There is enough happening here to reward listening closely, but much of it occurs at the microscopic level: tones rubbing against one another, distortion producing new harmonics, the cassette surface appearing whenever the music thins, and the enormous difference between the brighter pressure of Side A and the low subterranean pull of Side B. It is a small tape with a very narrow set of materials, but it keeps finding different ways to make those materials occupy space.
—ChatGPT

Oozing Meat - 2018 - Contaminated CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018 11:48PM

Dead Gods ‎– GODS18

The physical cassette already announces the basic vocabulary before anything is played: contamination, bodily matter, sickness, cheap reproduction and excessive information. The murky green-blue presentation, degraded imagery, tiny printed details and utilitarian cassette shell make it feel less like a polished album package than an infected object that happened to arrive in a plastic case. Dead Gods issued it as GODS18, and inside that small package Oozing Meat cram approximately nineteen minutes of material into 766 tracks. That number sounds absurd until the tape starts. Then it begins to feel completely logical.
Side A runs a little over nine and a half minutes and immediately establishes the method. Acoustic drums, harsh electronics, distorted vocals and bursts of feedback are chopped into pieces so short that the individual “tracks” frequently exist only as impacts. A blast begins, collapses, something screams through an effect, a drum pattern briefly finds its footing, and another mass of noise wipes it away. At other moments several of those elements simply pile on top of one another. The recording is rough and overloaded, but not featureless. There are substantial changes in frequency and density throughout the side, including passages where the low body suddenly drops away and thin electrical noise or near-silence creates a tiny opening before everything fills back in. Those interruptions are important because the cassette would be much less violent if it were merely loud all the time. The empty spaces turn the next impact into another beginning. There are also fleeting moments when the drums settle into something resembling an actual groove, but Oozing Meat seem almost allergic to letting one remain intact. Just as the body starts understanding a rhythm, it is cut apart.
Side B is almost exactly the same length but has a noticeably different weight. It spends more time in the low and middle frequencies, giving sections of it a thicker, uglier physical shove compared with the brighter abrasion of much of Side A. The constant mutation continues: short percussion explosions, blown-out voices, feedback, electronic squeal, tape-like interruptions and strange fragments that briefly sound organized before being swallowed. Some passages are almost comically brief. Calling them songs seems wrong, but calling the whole thing one continuous noise piece also misses what is happening. It is hundreds of microscopic decisions presented at a speed where structure becomes texture. Oozing Meat’s particular version of noisecore lives in that contradiction. Jason Hodges and Eric Tomillon use drums, vocals and electronics, but instead of stretching those materials into conventional compositions they compress them until a whole sequence can occur in the time another band might spend counting in.
That makes the ridiculous track count more than a joke printed on an insert. You really can hear the tape continually restarting itself. It draws from the vocabulary of early noisecore and grind, but harsh noise is just as important: long enough passages of feedback and damaged electronics appear that the listener can briefly sink into a sound before another barrage begins. Samples occasionally enter like foreign matter. Voices are often processed until language is less important than the wet, strangled or abrasive shape they make. The drums give the chaos a human physical center, especially because they do not sound cleaned up or separated from the room. Everything leaks into everything else. The cassette recording adds another layer of grit, so distortion is present not only as an effect but as part of the medium itself.
The name Oozing Meat is almost embarrassingly accurate for the sound. This music does not behave like a machine executing perfect digital edits even though the track count suggests microscopic precision. It lurches, sprays, clots, stops, starts and occasionally finds a pulse. That collision between obsessive counting and bodily mess is one of the cassette’s funniest qualities. There is something inherently absurd about declaring that this short tape contains 766 tracks, then making music chaotic enough that nobody could reasonably sit there and verify them without losing their mind.
Oozing Meat were the Richmond, Virginia duo of Eric Tomillon on vocals and electronics and Jason Hodges on drums, vocals and electronics, coming out of the same broader world as Fake Object, Suppression, Brown Piss and Chaotic Noise Productions. Their work repeatedly combined 1990s-style noisecore with harsh noise, horror samples, loops and industrial debris. On this cassette those ingredients are packed particularly tightly. It does not feel like harsh noise with drums added or grindcore obscured by electronics. The distinction keeps collapsing. Drumming becomes noise, feedback becomes punctuation, vocals become another frequency, and hundreds of “songs” become a single approximately nineteen-minute object.
The original Private Release post from January 2018 consisted almost entirely of the cassette, the Dead Gods catalog number and a download. Returning to the physical copy and making a fresh rip changes that considerably. Both sides can now be heard as complete cassette sides rather than merely represented by a link. The object, the strange arithmetic of 766 tracks and the actual degraded sound all finally occupy the same post. It remains completely unreasonable music, which is precisely what makes documenting it in detail worthwhile.
—ChatGPT

Plague Mother - 2018 - No Balm In Gilead CS

Originally posted Jan 30, 2018

Dead Gods ‎– GODS19

The packaging is beautifully economical: pale blue paper, heavy black photocopy texture, crooked borders, smeared toner and an image on the front that almost disappears into its own accumulation of lines. The spine is nearly swallowed by the repeated PLAGUE MOTHER lettering, while the back gives only the three titles, the Dead Gods mark and GODS#16. Inside, the cassette itself is completely clear except for a black-and-white paper label covered in repeating circular forms. Nothing about it feels polished or decorative. It has the blunt physical language of noise tapes: cheap materials pushed until their imperfections become part of the design.

Side A is entirely “Takotsubo,” roughly five minutes of extremely dense electronic pressure. It gets to work almost immediately and then stays remarkably committed to the same overloaded space. Rather than depending on obvious pauses or dramatic edits, the movement happens inside the mass itself: different frequencies scrape forward, recede and get buried, with the surface continually changing while the overall block remains intact. There is a constant coarse grain to it, somewhere between electrical interference, overloaded machinery and damaged amplification. The recording is loud but not flattened into an indistinguishable rectangle. Small fluctuations in level and texture keep opening cracks inside the noise, particularly through the middle, before the final section becomes brighter and more abrasive. It feels less like a sequence of events than being held inside one sustained event while its internal structure keeps rearranging itself.

Side B changes the proportions considerably. “Recovery Room” begins much quieter and darker, with low-frequency material sitting underneath a comparatively open surface. For the first minute especially there is space around the sound, which makes every rough edge more exposed. Gradually more upper-frequency noise begins entering the picture and the piece thickens without simply copying the wall on Side A. By the time “Anxiety Answering” takes over, the tape has reached a steadier, more pressurized electronic churn. The second half keeps a strong low and midrange body underneath sharper material, creating something heavy without becoming completely opaque. There is still plenty of abrasion, but the attraction is in the layering: dull mechanical weight underneath fizzing, tearing and increasingly bright electronic activity.

The three titles are especially good against this music: “Takotsubo,” “Recovery Room” and “Anxiety Answering.” They read almost like stages of a medical emergency, although the cassette never spells out a narrative for you. The title on the cover, “NO BALM IN GILEAD,” only deepens that feeling of injury, treatment and the possibility that treatment may not arrive. What I like is that none of this requires the noise to illustrate those ideas literally. The sound remains stubbornly physical. Pressure, grain, volume, electrical movement and the material character of the cassette do most of the communicating.

It is also a very compact release. There is no filler and almost no distance between the object and what comes out of it. The Xeroxed blue insert, clear shell, black geometric label and approximately ten minutes of harsh electronics all belong to the same small, severe thing. Eight years after originally putting this post up with essentially nothing but a download link, it is worth returning to the actual tape. There is much more here than that old post recorded.

—ChatGPT

TAZ 90 - 2020 - Volume 1: Contempt CS

Originally posted May 18, 2020

Dead Gods ‎– 048

The first side spends fifteen minutes moving downward. It begins with a rough mechanical churn already underway, something low and repetitive pushing beneath a layer of buzzing electronic grit. There is enough activity above it during the opening minutes that the recording initially feels broad, almost crowded, but the deeper sound keeps winning territory. Instead of constantly introducing new material, TAZ 90 seems to keep stripping away whatever is preventing that underlying motion from taking over.
For the first three minutes the rougher edges are still easy to follow. Thin rasping sounds flare above the low movement, sometimes sharp enough to pull attention completely away from what is underneath. Then the balance starts changing. Around four minutes the bass becomes heavier and the piece seems to settle closer to the floor. The higher abrasion never disappears, but it increasingly behaves like debris being carried along by something larger.
The middle of the side is strange because very little announces itself as an event. There are no obvious edits saying that one section has ended and another has begun. Instead, the sound keeps changing its posture. It slumps lower. It briefly becomes rougher. A buzzing band moves forward and then gets swallowed again. Somewhere around seven or eight minutes the recording seems to weaken slightly, only to come back with more low-end force during the next several minutes. By ten minutes the side has become noticeably louder and heavier than the stretch immediately before it.
The final two minutes are where the direction becomes unmistakable. More and more of the middle drops away until the recording is dominated by a huge low vibration. By the last minute, nearly everything that made the opening feel abrasive and busy has been reduced to a thin crust around that deep movement. Side A does not end by exploding. It ends by sinking.
Side B flips the behavior immediately. It begins much brighter and more agitated, with far more activity living above the bass. The opening feels almost wiry after the end of Side A. Repeating electronic movement, scraping tones and a rough buzzing center keep colliding, while the deeper material stays comparatively restrained underneath them.
For several minutes the side gradually puts weight back on. Around five minutes, the lower sound suddenly becomes much more substantial, briefly turning the recording into something closer to the heavy environment of Side A. But TAZ 90 does not stay there. The piece keeps changing altitude. By six or seven minutes, harsher activity has returned above the low movement, and the recording begins another long climb.
The middle section has a stubborn, almost motorized quality. Certain motions recur often enough to feel familiar without ever resolving into a comfortable rhythm. The sound keeps rubbing against itself. Something buzzes, catches, repeats, becomes distorted by whatever is happening around it and comes back slightly altered. For several minutes the tape seems content to run this machinery without explaining where it is going.
After ten minutes, it becomes increasingly obvious.
The second side starts moving upward. Rougher upper material becomes more exposed, first gradually and then with increasing insistence. Around twelve minutes the sound is substantially brighter than it was through the middle, and by thirteen to fourteen minutes the recording has reached its most abrasive state. Thin electrical squeals, rough midrange grinding and sharper bursts keep cutting through. Where Side A had spent its closing minutes burying itself, Side B seems determined to scrape its way out.
Then the last minute pulls a trapdoor.
Almost at the finish, the huge low sound suddenly returns. After several minutes of increasing brightness, the recording drops back toward the bottom with surprising force. The deepest material takes possession of the ending, leaving the tape in almost the same subterranean territory that Side A had spent fifteen minutes discovering.
That makes the cassette much more interesting than a simple pair of harsh-noise sides. Side A is a descent. Side B spends most of its duration climbing back out, then gets dragged downward again at the last possible moment. The two pieces keep changing what feels physically closest: sometimes the abrasion seems right against the ear, sometimes the low vibration feels larger than everything above it.
The object itself is unusually stark. The cover is a purple-and-black reproduction of a tightly cropped figure and equipment, bordered by a heavy interlocking pattern. Inside, almost everything disappears into black except the plain text: TAZ 90, “VOLUME I: CONTEMPT,” and “RECORDED IN CLEVELAND, OH.” Another panel and the clear cassette carry a dense black-and-white repeating graphic that looks almost camouflage-like once it is cropped across the shell. The packaging gives very little explanation. It presents the name, the location and the object.
“Contempt” is equally blunt. The tape does not need to explain the target of that word. What matters is the behavior it names: refusal to resolve cleanly, refusal to provide relief at the expected moment, refusal even to let Side B escape the place Side A sank into.
Side A goes underground.
Side B claws upward.
At the end, the ground opens again.
—ChatGPT

Telepherique / MSBR - 1993 - Amalgam 7''

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 5:55PM

MSBR Records ‎– 004

Amalgam is a compact 1993 collaboration between Telepherique and MSBR, released by MSBR Records as MR04 on a numbered 7-inch acetate. Compared with the longer cassette collaborations that followed, the format immediately changes the scale of the work. There is no room here for twenty-minute development or extended drift. The collaboration has to exist in a much tighter physical space.
The title is appropriate. An amalgam is a material produced by combining different elements into something that is neither simply one nor the other. That describes the relationship between Telepherique and MSBR particularly well. Telepherique’s work often moves through industrial electronics, controlled atmosphere and carefully structured sound, while Koji Tano’s MSBR project was developing the harsher, denser electronic language that would become central to his later Japanese noise recordings.
MSBR was still very early in its existence at this point. Koji Tano began releasing work under the name around 1992, and 1993 was an especially active formative year, including Structured Suicide as well as split and collaborative releases with Telepherique, Taint and Smell & Quim. Amalgam therefore belongs to the period when MSBR’s vocabulary was still being established through both solo recordings and contact with other artists.
That context makes the collaboration more interesting than treating it simply as an early noise single. The international industrial and experimental underground of the period operated heavily through correspondence, small labels, mail-order catalogs and physical exchanges. A German project and a Japanese noise artist could share a release without needing the infrastructure of a large record company or conventional music industry distribution. The object itself became evidence of that network.
The 7-inch format also puts pressure on the sound. Noise and industrial music are often associated with duration, accumulation and endurance, but a small record forces concentration. Ideas have to appear quickly. Textures cannot rely on twenty minutes of gradual transformation to create their effect. Whatever relationship exists between the two projects has to become audible almost immediately.
That makes Amalgam feel closer to an experiment in collision than a fully expanded collaboration. Telepherique’s tendency toward structure and MSBR’s harsher electronic density meet in a compressed environment. Neither identity has enough space to dominate for long, which gives the record a kind of unstable balance.
The physical presentation reinforces that economy. The surviving artwork is extremely spare: black-and-white, minimal, and centered around the names Telepherique and MSBR with the Amalgam title. There is very little visual narrative imposed on the listener. The package behaves more like documentation attached to an experimental object than a conventional commercial sleeve.
The fact that the release is an acetate is also significant. Acetates are inherently more fragile than standard pressed vinyl and are usually associated with short-run or transitional production rather than mass manufacture. A numbered acetate edition therefore makes Amalgam feel even more temporary and specific, an object produced in limited quantity for a small network rather than something designed for indefinite circulation.
Seen from the perspective of the later Telepherique/MSBR collaborations, Amalgam feels almost like an early point of contact. Geplünderte Leichen in 1994 would give the pair much more room to develop a conceptual and structural relationship, while later projects around the same network would expand collaboration further. Amalgam is smaller, earlier and more compressed.
That compression is part of its appeal. It captures two developing approaches to industrial and noise music touching briefly enough to leave a physical trace.
The title says exactly what happened.
—ChatGPT

Telepherique / Contagious Orgasm / MSBR - 1996 - Contact #1 LP

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 5:48PM

SSSM ‎– none

Contact #1 brings together Telepherique, Contagious Orgasm and MSBR in a format that is more interesting than a conventional three-way split. Rather than simply giving each artist an isolated section, the release moves between individual pieces and collaborations, allowing the three projects to overlap without completely dissolving their identities. The title fits that construction perfectly. This is not presented as a permanent group or a unified new project. It documents contact.
The material was originally released in 1996, during a period when all three projects were deeply involved in the international industrial, noise and experimental underground. Telepherique brought a German approach that could move between industrial electronics, ambient space and carefully organized sound. Contagious Orgasm had already developed a much less predictable language, often combining unsettling atmospheres, loops, fragments and sounds that seem to operate somewhere between musique concrète and psychological collage. MSBR brought Koji Tano’s much more abrasive Japanese noise vocabulary into the exchange.
That combination means Contact #1 does not behave like a record where three artists simply take turns demonstrating their specialties. The interesting moments are the places where one approach begins affecting another. Mechanical structure can loosen into something more atmospheric. Dense noise can leave enough space for small sounds to become important. Repetition can become hypnotic before another layer disrupts it.
The six pieces are “Weltgeschehen,” “Operation Crossroads,” “Fire Wall,” an untitled piece, “Thematic Apperception Test,” and “08.05.1945–08.05.1995.” Even the titles suggest a much wider field than personal expression. There are references to world events, military technology, psychological testing and historical memory. “Operation Crossroads,” for example, shares its name with the 1946 United States nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll, while the final title marks the fifty-year span between May 8, 1945 and May 8, 1995.
That historical language sits comfortably beside the sound-world implied by these artists. Machinery, communication systems, contamination, psychology, technology and destruction repeatedly appear around industrial and noise music, but Contact #1 avoids turning those subjects into simple theatrical decoration. The pieces remain abstract enough that the titles operate more like coordinates than explanations.
“Thematic Apperception Test” is an especially appropriate title in that regard. The actual psychological test asks a person to construct stories around ambiguous images. Experimental sound can operate in a similar way. When conventional melody, lyrics and recognizable song structures disappear, the listener begins supplying relationships and narratives to sounds that may never have been intended to represent anything specific.
The packaging reinforces that ambiguity. The cover is built from stark black-and-white photographic material rather than conventional artist portraits. Bodies, machinery, structures and textures are difficult to separate cleanly. The images appear documentary but do not immediately explain what they document. The typography is equally restrained, allowing the three artist names and Contact #1 title to function almost like identifying information attached to evidence.
That restraint is useful because three projects this distinctive could easily have produced artwork overloaded with industrial clichés. Instead, the design feels closer to an archive or technical file. The physical cassette shown here carries that imagery into another format, turning a collaboration originally associated with the mid-1990s international noise network into another circulating tape object.
Contact #1 also sits inside a larger web of collaboration. Telepherique and MSBR had already worked together earlier in the decade, while Contagious Orgasm and Telepherique would continue collaborating in later years. Koji Tano’s MSBR project was particularly active in collaborative releases, working with artists from different countries and different approaches to noise. In that environment, collaboration was not simply a guest appearance. It was a method for creating situations where established working habits could be disrupted.
That is what makes Contact #1 more compelling than three unrelated tracks placed on the same record. Each artist arrives with a recognizable vocabulary, but the release is constructed around the possibility that those vocabularies might interfere with one another.
The word “contact” is therefore doing a lot of work. Contact can mean communication, collision, contamination, exchange or simply two things touching long enough to leave evidence on each other.
This release preserves that evidence.
—ChatGPT

Telepherique & MSBR - 1994 - Geplünderte Leichen CS

Originally posted Aug 12, 2019 6:01PM

Drahtfunk-Products ‎– 042 

Telepherique and MSBR’s Geplünderte Leichen is a 1994 cassette collaboration that uses the language of a body being handled after death as the organizing structure for Side A. The title translates roughly as “Plundered Corpses,” and the five pieces move through a sequence that is almost procedural: “Wem Gehört Die Leiche?” asks “Whose corpse is it?,” followed by “Präparieren” (prepare), “Sezieren” (dissect), “Organentnahme” (organ removal), and finally “Entsorgung” (disposal). Rather than giving the cassette a loose horror theme, those titles make it read like a sequence of operations.
The first three tracks are almost exactly the same length, each just under three minutes, which gives the beginning of Side A a clipped, sectional feel. “Wem Gehört Die Leiche?” establishes a relatively restrained industrial/noise environment before “Präparieren” pushes the high-frequency activity further forward. “Sezieren” is noticeably harsher and more electrically active, with a brighter, more abrasive upper register and greater overall intensity. Even without the titles, those first three pieces feel increasingly invasive.
“Organentnahme” changes the pacing. At more than six minutes it is roughly twice the length of any of the opening pieces, allowing the material to develop rather than simply strike and disappear. The sound remains mechanical and abstract, but there is more time for layers to accumulate and separate. Small changes in texture become more important because the piece is no longer working as a compact burst. “Entsorgung,” at nearly seven minutes, extends that process further and closes Side A with one of its most sustained passages. The first side therefore moves from several short procedures into two longer stretches that feel less like separate events and more like the aftermath of what the titles have already described.
The collaboration itself is important because Telepherique and MSBR came from different but overlapping strands of the international industrial and experimental cassette underground. Telepherique’s work frequently moves between industrial structure, electronics, ambient space and musique concrète-like sound organization, while MSBR, the project of Koji Tano, became strongly associated with Japanese noise and harsh electronic work. Geplünderte Leichen does not simply alternate between “German industrial” and “Japanese noise.” The interesting territory is where those tendencies interfere with one another.
That becomes particularly clear on Side B. Instead of another numbered set of short pieces, the entire side is presented as one long, approximately twenty-two-minute work. It has the scale to move through several different densities without announcing boundaries. There are stretches where the sound seems almost suspended, followed by areas where the spectrum thickens and the recording becomes more abrasive. Low mechanical tones, sharper electronic frequencies and broad bands of noise coexist without settling into a conventional rhythm.
The absence of obvious percussion is important. Much of the movement comes from texture itself: sounds entering, receding, accumulating, scraping against one another, or changing density. It gives the cassette a physical quality without relying on beats to create momentum. The listener is not carried forward by a groove. Instead, attention gets pulled toward surfaces, pressure and changes in the electronic environment.
The recording also benefits from being heard as a cassette-era object rather than as spotless digital noise. There is a softness around some of the harsher material and a continuous low-level background that keeps even the quieter passages from becoming truly empty. On Side B especially, silence never feels entirely silent. The medium leaves a floor underneath the electronics, which suits music built around gradual changes in density.
The artwork follows the same logic. Black-and-white imagery, clinical typography and stark photographic material give the package the character of documentation rather than decoration. The design does not romanticize the medical/body imagery. It presents it bluntly, almost like evidence. That visual restraint makes the titles more disturbing than an exaggerated gore aesthetic would have.
The cassette is also unusually balanced in duration. Side A’s five pieces total just under twenty-two minutes, while Side B runs a little over twenty-two minutes as one continuous work. That symmetry gives the object two very different structural halves: one divided and named, the other prolonged and uninterrupted. Side A tells the listener where one stage ends and another begins. Side B removes those signposts.
Geplünderte Leichen works because it does not depend on shock alone. The titles provide an explicit conceptual frame, but the audio itself remains abstract enough that it never turns into simple sound-effects theater. There are no obvious cinematic gestures telling the listener exactly what to imagine. The body-processing language sits beside electronics that are mechanical, abrasive and sometimes strangely spacious.
Thirty years later, the cassette still feels specific to a period when international noise and industrial artists could build entire collaborative worlds through small labels, mail exchange and limited physical editions. Telepherique and MSBR did not need to resolve their different approaches into one unified style. Geplünderte Leichen sounds more interesting because both identities remain partly visible inside the same object.
Side A names the procedure. Side B lets the machinery continue running after the labels disappear.
—ChatGPT